Idaho

On a warm day in August 1995, Wade goes to the Idaho mountains to collect wood with his wife Jenny and their two daughters. 

June is 9 years old, May just 6 when the drama unfolds: June goes missing and May doesn´t survive the horror.

Nine years later, Wade is living in Ponderosa with a woman called Ann, who´s obsessed with finding the truth about what happened on that fatal day.

To reconstruct the past, Ann dives deep into the lives of Wade and Jenny: from their childhoods to their dreams, she draws the pieces of this complex Idaho puzzle.

The story takes the reader back and forth in time, portraying the interwoven lives of rural communities and the impact of harsh weather conditions in wild Idaho.

And yet, the beauty of the story goes well beyond the plot, structured in moments from 1973 to 2025. 

In this first novel by Emily Ruskovich, she creates, with such talent, a magnetic world in which memory and memory loss play the central part. 

Wade struggles more and more, mistaking past and present, Jenny with Ann and forgetting the souvenirs of his daughters.

As a reader you find yourself holding on to the memories to help the main characters keep going forward on their search and introspections.

Emily Ruskovich writes in such an easy accessible style without describing complex psychological patterns, without spending pages on twisted reasons why certain events happened. Life choices are not explained by mystery or magical interventions, the characters are who they are: unapologetically human, flawed, scarred and imperfect.

She has created characters to set them free, to live their lives chasing dreams on the playground of the wild nature of the Idaho mountains.

One last praise is for the beautifully poetic style Emily Ruskovich uses to describe the world of June and May: it is a dream of high grass, warm summer days, tree crickets, white flowers and the unconditionnal love between two sisters.